


Jigsaw Falling Into Place

by althusserarien (ArmchairElvis)



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Drinking, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-10
Updated: 2012-11-10
Packaged: 2017-11-18 09:03:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/559220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmchairElvis/pseuds/althusserarien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She wonders when he’ll stop pushing, wonders if he ever will.</i> Vaguely post-<i>Joy</i>. Early House/Cuddy nostalgia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jigsaw Falling Into Place

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks go to [](http://nomad1328.livejournal.com/profile)[**nomad1328**](http://nomad1328.livejournal.com/), [](http://zulu.livejournal.com/profile)[**zulu**](http://zulu.livejournal.com/) and [](http://pwcorgigirl.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://pwcorgigirl.livejournal.com/)**pwcorgigirl** for various beta and hand-holding duties. Cheers!
> 
> Originally published at my [Livejournal](http://joe-pike-junior.livejournal.com/172966.html) way back in 2008. I wrote this way back when House and Cuddy were almost an item but he certainly hadn't driven a car into her house, and I'm posting it now because hey, why not. You'll be pleased to learn that in the intervening time I've learnt to write a bit better, and in complete sentences almost 90% of the time!

You do it to yourself, you do / and that’s what really hurts  
Radiohead // Just

Any workday night. Her dining table, a lukewarm mug of herbal tea, the bright squawk of the cooking show on in the living room undercut by the gentle hum of the central heating. It’s all so suffocatingly normal that Cuddy forgets the fresh cans of paint sitting against the nursery wall. She forgets that she's battling inertia and losing. It’s just the television and her table and her _work_ , the comfort of uncomplicated hindsight.

She doesn’t need to meet with Ogden to discuss his research for another week, yet she’s slogging her way through his grants and outcomes and reports. Maybe she's reading, maybe she's asleep. She hasn't turned a page in fifteen minutes.

The knock comes at the door, and she jerks her head up away from the crook of her elbow. She gets up to answer it even though she doesn’t want to, because she only knows one person who’d drop by unannounced this late at night. And then she lets him in because it seems rude to slam the door or leave him standing in the cold on her doorstep. She does all this because she has no reason not to: she wants to hate him but can’t think of a reason why. The balance reasserts itself, the old game they play.

House’s cheeks are red. He smells of cold and smoke. He glances at the table and sneers at the Da Vinci mug and says, “Go get a coat on.”

He seems bigger than he should be in her kitchen. She leans against the door jamb. Odgen’s machinations are a balm because while he’s scheming and pedantic and occasionally unpredictable, he’s not insane. He’s a by-the-book guy, Ogden. Leave the serious stuff for memos and the gossip for the first hole. Let administration ask for everything twice. She’s been dealing with the old boys' club her entire career. This back-and-forth with House is something different, something she can't predict. House lives his life on a more unstable plane, in a place she can't help but step back from.

He opens the fridge and makes a face at the contents.

She crosses her arms and leans against the door jamb. “Why?”

“It’s cold.”

He crosses to the bench and finds her keys next to the neat stack of mail, separated into junk and bills. 

He dangles them enticingly. “You’re driving.”

She goes down the hall to get her coat. House stands by the front door, idly spinning her keychain. There's a strange look in his eyes, some sort of merriment.

“Why can’t you drive? I assume that’s how you got here.”

“I’ve been drinking.”

His face is closed off to her. He inclines his head towards the door and outside. As she passes by him she smells alcohol humming underneath the soapy smell of the hospital, the detergent on his clothes. She wonders how far he is over the limit, and old med-school refrains of weight and height and time since consumption ring through her head.

His motorcycle engine ticks at the kerb, and she thinks of the risks he takes with speed compounded by blood alcohol concentration. Drugs compounded by recklessness. How sometimes she wonders that he’s even here at all.

…

He directs her to a coffee shop that’s still open. He orders a coffee. It’s ten hours later than Cuddy ever drinks anything with that much caffeine in it, so she has a hot chocolate. House wanders off and leaves her to pay.

She carries the cups out to the car in a cardboard takeaway tray, because she can read the lines of pain in the high set of his shoulders and the stiffness of his gait. Like an open book. That's one thing she can see.

“So,” House says. “Where to?”

Cuddy shakes her head, sipping at her hot chocolate. “No, House. I don’t want to do that tonight.”

“Do what?” He opens his door and levers himself out, one hand gripping tight at the edge of the roof.

“That stupid romantic driving thing.” He’s out and leaning against the bonnet. A passing couple stare, and he gives them a fake-merry smile. Cuddy opens her window. “We’re not in college any more.”

“Fine,” he says. “We’ll stay here.”

They sit. Cuddy watches the steam rising off her drink. After a while House turns his head up to the sky, even though it's obscured under the glare of the street lights, the sodium-vapour monochrome. Half a lifetime reduced to nights like this: knowing someone without even knowing them at all.

…

Thursday night, and although she has turned her back on Ogden’s machinations for the moment and towards patient satisfaction surveys, it’s the same old rut. Tea, television, work. When the telephone rings she reaches for the handset and answers as if she’s at work. “Lisa Cuddy.”

A wedge of background noise, the murky bass of a cheap stereo system. On top of that a murmur of voices, rising and falling in drunken waves.

“I’m at Barry’s Tavern. Do you know it?”

He doesn’t slur his words much, but it’s there: clouded distraction, dissociation. Cuddy doesn’t know Barry’s Tavern from WalMart, and if House wasn’t completely drunk he’d know that.

“House,” she says. “I can’t do this.”

She knows what comes next: he’ll need to be driven home. He’ll need to be bailed out. One night there won’t be a call.

“It’s in the middle of freakin nowhere.”

There’s a roar behind him, the noise of a drunken crowd of men around a television screen or a fight or a keg stand. The stuff of rowdy bars, the kickers-on who don’t leave when they’ve had enough. She hears him chuckle, then he doesn’t say anything for maybe twenty seconds.

“House?”

“It’s in Plainsboro. Near the interstate. About half a mile past that little strip mall with the beauty parlor and the tackle shop.”

As far as Cuddy knows House has never been in the vicinity of a tackle shop or a beauty parlor. As soon as he gives the directions he hangs up, forestalling refusal.

It’s nestled next to some bowling lanes, with a wide cracked asphalt parking lot sprouting sickly-looking weeds. As she rolls up the double doors burst open, emitting a blast of harsh music and a bouncer leading a skinny underage-looking kid by the arm. The kid vomits on the sidewalk and staggers off somewhere. It’s not a classy joint.

House is inside holding up the bar, his back curved toward the door. He’s slouching on a stool. The place is very crowded. When she sits beside him he holds up a glass and two fingers to the bartender. Cuddy shakes her head, and he shrugs. His eyes are red.

“Just one for the road. Make it a double.”

There are a couple of shot glasses on the bar beside him, and some more short glasses. He started with shots and moved on to bourbon and Coke. His drink arrives. Cuddy looks at him as he throws it down: his movements are lazy and imprecise, his eyes barely focused.

The bartender motions at Cuddy and says, “Will you be having anything?”

“No.”

“Are you with him?”

She nods, and he puts House’s keys on the counter before her.

“Get rid of him before he starts a fight. He owes me twenty-five bucks.”

House takes his wallet out and opens it, staring down at the contents with a confused look on his face. He waves it at her and shrugs. "Oops."

The only cash he has is two crumpled ones. Cuddy pays the bartender out of her own pocket and tells House it’s time to go. He folds himself off the stool like he’s been sitting for a long time, and walking out he changes course just in time to avoid bumping into a huge scruffy type ferrying glasses and a jug of beer across to a table.

His face is sallow under the parking lot lights. She has to grab his arm to stop him from falling flat on his face, although by now she knows that if he falls down he won’t feel it until tomorrow. She has to open the door for him, and once he has clumsily manoeuvered himself into the seat she has to do up his seatbelt, too. He sits and looks out the window, giving off fumes. When she indicates and turns back onto the road, he squints at her. “Thanks.”

“Doesn’t Wilson usually do this?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says, “He hasn’t done this since… you know.”

He makes a choking noise with his tongue and draws one finger across his throat. Since Amber died. Cuddy grips the steering wheel and stares straight ahead.

It takes her two wrong turns to find his place because she’s coming from the wrong direction, and House is no help. He spills out of the car door and conveniently puts his face to Cuddy’s breasts, and she entertains dumping him on the sidewalk to sleep it off like the bum he is. They make their way to his door in an awkward three-legged race, Cuddy carrying House’s cane. He stumbles up the steps, his face stupid and vacant. She fumbles his keys into the lock.

In the bedroom Cuddy sees the open bottle of Oxycontin beside the usual one of Vicodin, the nightstand littered with little white pills, a felony conviction in still life.

She leaves him on the bed, on top of the bedspread, his shoes still on. She writes a note and leaves it on the kitchen countertop, where he’ll see it when he rolls out of bed tomorrow with a heavy head. _Happy hangover. Let’s not do that again sometime._

Her car seems so large without his drunken presence beside her. She can still smell the whisky. She wonders when he’ll stop pushing, wonders if he ever will.

…

He's going to keep pushing. He isn't waiting for something to give, he's waiting for her to push back. It's cold out in the parking lot but he's leaning against her car, anyway. Waiting for her to move. Passive in the only way he knows how. He bangs the flat of one hand against the handle of his cane, tense.

She doesn’t know what to say. There’s nowhere else to go. He has his motorcycle helmet in one hand. She nods to him, hears herself saying, “Come over.” He limps away to his motorcycle, roars past her a quarter mile down the road.

When she gets home her Hide-A-Key is open and abandoned on the path, the door open. He’s back in her hall, back in her life, and he takes her bag and drops it to the floor. She’d forgotten this part of him: forceful, hungry. He’s only ever manipulative when he hasn’t got what he wants. Maybe Cuddy's letting herself be manipulated and maybe she isn't, but it's all the same.

She pulls him into the bedroom, onto the bed, and he’s fumbling at his shirt, half-pulling it over his head. He pulls at her top as she starts to unbutton his jeans, and everything happens like it did before. It’s the old pattern, the one she can’t break away from. The years weigh heavy on him. Her fault: that's the old argument, but when does it start being his fault?

Afterwards he sits on the side of the bed, pulling his jeans on. Slowly. She reaches out to touch his back, feeling how he instinctively pulls away. “Stay,” she says, and the old pattern breaks for once. He sleeps. He gets up early and paces his way around her living room. When she wakes in the morning he’s in bed again, snoring softly, one arm beneath the pillow. She doesn’t wonder: she doesn’t stop to think.


End file.
